How to Get Somewhat Better at Art

Otherppl with Brad Listi

Brad Listi

Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.8 • 554 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new 'Craftwork' episode, about how to get (somewhat) better at art. My guest is Nicholson Baker, author of Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, available from Penguin Press. Nicholson Baker has written seventeen books, including The Mezzanine, Vox, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, and Baseless--also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Hermann Hesse Prize. Baker has two grown children; he and his wife live on the Penobscot River in Maine. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, everybody, welcome to The Other People's Show. I am Brad Listy and I'm your host. It's good to be with you. Thank you for listening. I'm here in Los Angeles and I hope that everything is going okay, wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to subscribe to this show wherever you listen. It's free. Just hit the
0:22.1	subscribe button. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow this podcast on social media,
0:28.4	TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. So I have a great episode for you today, a special
0:36.8	craftwork episode that I am calling
0:40.3	How to Get Somewhat Better at Art.
0:43.3	I'm going to be in conversation with author Nicholson Baker.
0:47.3	He has a new book out called Finding a Likeness, How I Got Somewhat Better at Art.
0:54.7	It is available from Penguin Press.
0:57.9	Finding a likeness is, as you might imagine, an illustrated text and it details Nicholson
1:03.7	Baker's attempts to learn how to paint and draw with greater proficiency. He started this project in the wake of finishing his last book, which is called
1:15.6	Baseless.
1:16.9	And at the time he was feeling burnt out, he was feeling, I think, sick of the darkness,
1:24.8	might be a way to put it.
1:26.4	And he wanted to improve his artistic skills.
1:29.4	This had been a longstanding ambition of his.
1:32.4	So he had this idea for a book.
1:34.9	He pitched it to his publisher.
1:36.3	He got a green light.
1:38.1	And from there, he set about the task of educating himself on proper artistic technique, proper paints and pencils and paper and so on.
1:48.9	And in this book, you bear witness to his process and progress.
1:56.6	And he does improve pretty dramatically over the course of the book.
2:01.6	And it's really fun to bear witness to.
	...

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